No.
The sirens scream into my ears.
“Stop! Juan, por favor, stop!” My voice straining over the noise.
“Pops?” he says. For a wonder, he listens, and stops near our fence. He sees me for the first time.
“Turn around slowly, with your hands on your head!” the cop commands.
“Juan. Turn around. Show them you do not have a gun,” I say.
He opens his mouth, as if to tell me something.
“Listen to them m’ijo. Do it!”
He breathes out a short laugh, and turns.
I catch the glint of metal tucked into his jeans.
“I’m taking it out now, it’s okay, I’m taking it out,” says my son, as his hand dips down.
They shoot him. His body whirls in mad circles, while the police fire again and again. A bullet whines by my side, almost finds me. The guns roar until smoke chokes the air. Juan rests, finally, in a twisted heap by our fence, one hand curled around a post. He almost made it home.
I cannot swallow. Cannot breathe. The stench burns my nose. I slump forward until my knees settle on the ground.
“Back away, sir! Back away!” the police yell.
I hold up my hands and crawl to my boy on my knees. They let me do this until I am close.
An officer walks toward me, the calm one. He kicks Juan’s gun away. “That’s close enough.”
Still I cannot swallow. “But he’s my son.”
“Papa! Papa!”
Shivers nearly knock me over. My teeth rattling in my skull, I twist my neck around. My daughter. Why is she covered in red? Blood? Not her blood, please God.
“Papa! Mama won’t get up!”
I frown. My eyes wander to the front of our home. I see Martha crumpled in the doorframe, dark red blooming across her blouse, spilling down the step. Her body still, as if she is sleeping. In that moment, I understand.
I understand everything.
Se sigue hasta que se conduce.
About the Contributors
Wallace Baine is a critic, columnist, and editor in Santa Cruz, and the author of A Light in the Midst of Darkness, a history of Bookshop Santa Cruz. His work is nationally syndicated and his fiction appears in the Catamaran Literary Reader and the Chicago Quarterly Review. He is the author of Rhymes with Vain: Belabored humor and attempted profundity and The Last Temptation of Lincoln, from which his play Oscar’s Wallpaper was adapted.
Jon Bailiff is a retired lifeguard EMT, union shop steward, and marine rescue guard. He’s been a blacksmith, carpenter, artist, painter, weaver, and art teacher with Creativity Unlimited, William James Association, County Office of Probation, and Hope Services. He has lived in Santa Cruz for thirty years — not a local.
Jessica Breheny’s work has been published in Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Eleven Eleven, elimae, Fugue, LIT, Otoliths, Other Voices, and Santa Monica Review. She is the author of the chapbooks Some Mythology and Ephemeride. She lives in Santa Cruz.
Susie Bright is a best-selling author, journalist, audio producer, and editor. Her past works include The Best American Erotica, Herotica, and Full Exposure, as well as the memoir Big Sex Little Death. Bright was a screenwriter and/or consultant for Bound, Erotique, The Celluloid Closet, Transparent, and Criterion
Collection’s reissue of Belle de Jour. She is Editor-at-Large for Audible Studios, and the host of Audible’s longest-running podcast, In Bed with Susie Bright. She is a lifelong Californian.
Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the short story collections Sad Girls & Other Stories and Mary of the Chance Encounters. She is cofounder of the microtheater company Pachuca Productions. She is also completing her first nonfiction manuscript, Throwing the Curve, about the world of plus-size alternative models.
Ariel Gore is an award-winning editor and the author of ten books, including Atlas of the Human Heart, The End of Eve, and We Were Witches. She teaches online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers.
Seana Graham’s short stories have appeared in the journals Eleven Eleven and Salamander Magazine, and the anthology The Very Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is the book review editor at Escape Into Life.
Vinnie Hansen, a Claymore Award finalist, fled the howling winds of the South Dakota prairie and headed for the California coast the day after high school graduation. She is the author of numerous short stories and the Carol Sabala mystery series. Still sane after twenty-seven years of teaching high school English, Hansen has retired and lives in Santa Cruz with her husband and the requisite cat.
Naomi Hirahara is the Edgar Award — winning author of two mystery series set in Southern California. Her Mas Arai series, which features a Hiroshima survivor and gardener, ends with the publication of Hiroshima Boy in 2018. The first in her Officer Ellie Rush, Bicycle Cop mystery series received the T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award. Her father was a native of Watsonville, California.
Dillon Kaiser has lived in Santa Cruz County most of his life. He now lives in Sacramento with his wife and daughter, but part of him will always think of Watsonville as home. He holds a BA in comparative literature from UC Davis.
Beth Lisick is a writer and actor. She is the author of five books, including the New York Times best seller Everybody into the Pool. She cofounded San Francisco’s Porchlight Storytelling Series, traveled the country with the Sister Spit performance tours, and received a Creative Work Fund grant for a chapbook series with Creativity Explored, a studio for artists with developmental disabilities. Lisick grew up in San Jose and attended UC Santa Cruz.
Lou Mathews is a journalist, fiction writer, playwright, and fourth-generation Angeleno. Married at nineteen, he worked his way through UC Santa Cruz as a gas station attendant and mechanic. His first novel, LA Breakdown, was a Los Angeles Times best book of the year. He has received an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Pushcart Prize, and a Katherine Anne Porter Prize. He has taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1989.
Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel The Portable Veblen was long-listed for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction. She is the author of the novel MacGregor Tells the World and the story collection Stop That Girl. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. McKenzie is senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and the managing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.
Calvin McMillin is a writer, teacher, and scholar. Born in Singapore and raised in rural Oklahoma, he went on to earn a PhD in literature from UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of the short story collection The Sushi Bar at the Edge of Forever, and the editor of Frank Chin’s novel The Confessions of a Number One Son. McMillin is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, where he teaches literature and creative writing.